The
Johnny Depp Zone Interview
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A Head of Its Time

Tim
Burton (with a little help from Johnny Depp and Christina
Ricci—and
a lot of red goo) pumps fresh blood into Sleepy Hollow

“Hey,
can I get some blood over here!” As
Tim Burton hollers for fresh gore to smear on Johnny Depp, he rocks
back and forth in his director’s chair like a giddy teenager
hopped
up on sugar. A
demented grin spreads across his face, and a thought
occurs: Is it some kind of career goal for Burton to make Depp look
as ugly as humanly possible? In Edward Scissorhands,
Burton
turned the teen idol into a hideously scarred and pasty-faced outcast
with razor-sharp shears for hands. In Ed Wood, he
transformed
Depp into a dentally challenged hack filmmaker with a weakness for
tight angora sweaters and dainty pumps. And now, with Sleepy
Hollow—Burton’s adaptation of Washington
Irving’s gothic
19th-century fairy tale about Ichabod Crane and
the
Headless Horseman—all he can think about is smearing his
leading
man’s million-dollar mug with so much blood that Depp looks
like a
guy who just made love to a box of jelly doughnuts.

Even
Depp, an actor who welcomes ways to drab down his
looks, who
attacks his roles with the rabid gusto of a rottweiler, appears to be
wondering about Burton’s sanity as the director flings
crimson
syrup at his face as if it were a Jackson Pollock canvas.
“C’mon,
let me just give you a fresh basting,” says Burton. He dips a
tiny
paintbrush into the tub of red goo, then again, and
again—until
Depp can’t hold back any longer . . . “Tim,
what kind of sick
movie is this?”

Good
question. The moment you step inside Soundstage H at Shepperton
Studios—an hour north of London—you’re
immediately transported
to a haunted Hudson River forest, circa 1799. A thick curtain of fog
hangs in the air, along with a heavy, death-like stillness.
Blood-dappled autumn leaves cover the moist mossy ground. And the
trees . . . well, they’re Tim Burton trees.
Twisting
branches reach out like agonizingly arthritic arms, and one, the
so-called Tree of the Dead, rises 50 horrifically misshapen feet.
It’s through this gnarled gateway that Depp’s
Ichabod Crane—a
skittish New York City constable sent to investigate a series of
bizarre murders in the superstitious hamlet of Sleepy
Hollow—will
find the lair of the Headless Horseman and his grisly stash of
evidence.

It’s
also here that we find the source of all that fake blood. The
black-clad Depp—looking more Colonial undertaker than
constable—is
hacking away at the Tree of the Dead’s base with a hatchet,
each
blow bringing a new squirt of red stuff to his face. Twenty-five
feet away, Burton gazes into a monitor and smacks his lips with eerie
delight. And as Depp peels back a strip of bark, revealing a cache
of human heads, Burton literally rubs his hands together with
fiendish glee. “Ooooh,” whispers
the director. “It’s
like a giant piñata of heads.”

That
was the Christmas of 1998. It’s now two days before
Halloween
in 1999, in Manhattan, where midtown shops are decorated with holiday
cutouts of ghouls and black cats. Outside delis, stacked pumpkins
wait patiently for the sharp knife that will be taken to their
throats. It’s the time of year when a guy like Tim Burton
should
be a pretty happy fella.

And
yet, the 41-year-old director’s in a state of white-knuckled
panic. Tonight is the first press screening of Sleepy Hollow,
and
he’s lurking around an editing suite seven floors above
Broadway,
making harried last-minute trims and fixes. Burton’s
pre-curtain
jitters are understandable. First, there are the box office
concerns: At just under $80 million, Sleepy Hollow
isn’t
way over budget, but it is Paramount’s
best hope for a
holiday hit. Then, there are the stars: Johnny Depp may be one of
the finest actors of his generation, but his drawing power remains
uncertain—and indie darling Christina Ricci (The
Opposite of
Sex), as Depp’s love interest, isn’t
exactly a proven
audience magnet either. And finally, there’s Mars
Attacks!:
Burton’s last film was a big-budget flop—rare for
the man behind
Batman, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice and
The
Nightmare Before Christmas.

On
the other hand, it doesn’t hurt that Sleepy Hollow’s
script—credited to Andrew Kevin Walker (Seven)—received
a
stealthy stem-to-stern overhaul from Shakespeare in
Love’s
Oscar-winning screenwriter Tom Stoppard. Or, for that matter,
that Burton’s not-even-100-percent-finished version of the
film is
as hauntingly gorgeous as anything he (or anyone else) has ever
directed. “I don’t even know anymore,”
says an exasperated,
deadline-sweating Burton. “You spend so much time on
something
that when you get to this stage, your nerve endings don’t
allow you
to let it go. If I had three more months I could keep playing with
it, but sometimes it’s good to just pull the plug.”
Dressed in
his signature all-black Goth uniform and hiding behind an enormous
pair of blue-tinted wraparound shades, Burton adds, “If you
have
too much time to think, you can dig yourself into an emotional
hole.”

And
Burton knows from emotional holes. Before producer Scott Rudin
approached Burton about directing Sleepy Hollow, the
director
was stuck in a deep one. It wasn’t the fate of Mars
Attacks!,
which seemed to come and go overnight. “That kind
of thing
doesn’t stay with you too deeply because you can’t
really control
it,” says Burton. “I’m equally surprised
if a movie does well
or badly.”

No,
the director was heartbroken over his experience with Warner Bros. on
Superman Lives. After he’d worked on the
project for a year
(with Nicolas Cage set to star), the studio yanked the film away from
Burton, citing script problems and a steep budget. “I had
locations scouted and I had meeting after meeting. I don’t
think
those people realize how much of your heart and soul you pour into
something.” Burton slumps in his chair. “I was
pretty
shell-shocked by the whole situation. And I didn’t want to
make
any old piece of crap just to move on—I didn’t want
to be like,
‘Okay, I’ll do Police Academy 8 because
I need the work.’ So when Sleepy Hollow was
presented to me, it was like ‘This
is the script. Do you want to do it?’ Who knows, maybe it was
because of my previous year that I related to a character with no
head.”

Before
Burton came on board, the idea of a film about Ichabod
Crane
and the Headless Horseman had been kicking around for years. Well,
not so much kicking around as sitting on a shelf in Rudin’s
office. After reading Walker’s screenplay for Seven,
Rudin bought
the scribe’s Sleepy Hollow. He then held
on to it for six
years, until Paramount chairman Sherry Lansing got it rolling in
1998.

Rudin
says the failure of Mars Attacks! never crossed
his mind when
considering Burton. “Sometimes I think it’s good to
get someone
whose last film didn’t do well, because they’re a
little hungrier
for a hit,” he says. “Although Sleepy
Hollow is a big
film, it doesn’t need to be Batman or Superman
. . .
no one’s life is going to be made or destroyed based on how
well it
does, which can be creatively freeing.”

But
Burton was also drawn to the Headless Horseman for very personal
reasons. As a kid growing up in Burbank, he’d while away the
hours
in darkened theaters, watching mind-warping triple bills of Scream
Blacula Scream, Dr. Jeykyll and Sister Hyde, and Jason
and the
Argonauts.Sleepy Hollow was a throwback
to those flicks,
the kind that made him want to be a filmmaker in the first place.
“I
always remember how grateful I was to see them because they let you
work through things,” says Burton. “They were a
catharsis.”

Listening
to him riff on the therapeutic powers of Scream Blacula Scream,
it’s hard not to wonder: When a kid
finds catharsis,
redemption, even his basic sense of well-being watching schlock
horror, what kind of freakish misfit does he grow up to be?
“I
don’t consider myself strange at all. Ask my
girlfriend,” he
says, referring to actress Lisa Marie, who plays Ichabod’s
dead
mother in Sleepy Hollow.“I’m
not! . . . In fact,
early on in my career that made me quite sad, and that was the
inspiration for Edward Scissorhands. I’d
always wonder why
people are treating the monster badly—from King Kong all the
way
up. They treat it badly because they see it as different.”

If
anyone seems suited to see things from Burton’s
misunderstood-monster
point of
view, it’s Christina Ricci, star of two Addams
Family movies
and no stranger to oddball labeling by the press and movie industry.
Come to think of it, the oddest thing about her is that she
hasn’t
been in a Burton movie before now. “Something I thought was
kind
of impressive about Tim is he didn’t see me like other
people,”
says the 19-year-old, who plays Katrina Van Tassel, the
strong-willed, porcelain-doll daughter of Sleepy Hollow’s
richest
resident (Michael Gambon) and a no-good stepmother (Miranda
Richardson). “He cast me in the part of a completely angelic,
sweet and naïve young thing. And I thought, Wow, he must not
have seen any of my other movies.”

It’s
now two days after Burton’s jittery last-minute rush, and
Halloween has finally descended upon New York City. High above Park
Avenue, in a swank Regency Hotel penthouse suite, the only signs that
Johnny Depp has changed his appearance for the holiday are two
blinding gold-capped teeth. Depp says he got them to play a Gypsy in
his next film, The Man Who Cried. “A lot
of the Gypsies I
was hanging out with had them, so I went to the dentist,”
says Depp
of the gilded choppers, which actually make him look more like a Bond
villain from Moonraker. “Taking them off
I’m going to be
in big trouble. Apparently, it’s a pretty violent
process.”

A
less apparent but no less shocking change for the onetime tabloid bad
boy is fatherhood: Depp and French pop-star girlfriend Vanessa
Paradis recently had a baby girl, Lily-Rose Melody Depp. “I
feel
like there was a fog in front of my eyes for 36 years, and the second
she was born, that fog just lifted and everything became totally
clear and focused. To say it’s the greatest thing
that’s ever
happened to me is the understatement of the century.” Then
Depp—a
guy who in his younger, wilder days savaged fancy hotel rooms like
this one—catches himself and laughs. “Look at me,
I’ve become
a cliché.”

While
“Depp the father” may be a cliché,
“Depp the actor”
has carved a career out of very emphatically not following
the
ABCs of stardom. He hasn’t saved the world from giant
meteorites;
he hasn’t partnered with Jackie Chan to play a pair of wacky
cops. And as a result, he’s never had the kind of Happy Meal
tie-in
blockbuster that makes an actor an A-list star. “Maybe
I’m a
dummy,” says Depp, who seems more interested in hand-rolling
his
cigarette than in pondering this dilemma. “But I
don’t worry
that a lot of my films haven’t had big results at the box
office,
because I’m not a businessman. Believe me, I would love for
one of
my movies to be accepted by a wide audience, but I’m not
going to
do a film just because it’s going to do that.”

That’s
fine with Burton. “Johnny isn’t going to be the
same in every
movie. Plus, there’s a freedom with someone who’s
not concerned
about how they look in a movie . . . Actually, if it were up to
him, he’d look a lot worse.”

Depp
initially wanted to play Ichabod Crane with a long prosthetic snipe
nose, huge ears, and elongated fingers. Not surprisingly, those
suggestions were shot down. But after he read Stoppard’s
rewrite
of the script—which amped up not only Depp’s
romance with Ricci
but also the bunglingly comic aspects of his character—the
actor
was inspired to take the character even further. “I always
thought
of Ichabod as a very delicate, fragile person who was maybe a little
too in touch with his feminine side, like a
frightened little
girl,” says Depp. “It’s true,”
says Burton. “We may have
the first male action-adventure hero who acts like a 13-year-old
girl.”

In
truth, Depp’s Crane comes off more nervous dandy than
prepubescent
girlyman. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t
moments of concern
over his unique interpretation. “At the very beginning of the
shoot, Johnny told me that his inspiration for the part was going to
be Angela Lansbury in Death on the Nile,” says
Rudin, whose
initial horror disappeared as soon as he saw the dailies (at which
point he started referring to Depp as “Ichabod Crane: Girl
Detective” on set). “For his birthday I got him a
signed photo
of Angela Lansbury that read ‘From one sleuth to
another,’ and he
absolutely flipped.”

Wait,
let’s get this straight: A blood-soaked Johnny Depp is
channeling
Angela Lansbury while hacking away at a tree full of
human
heads? Sort of makes you wonder . . .